A commercial interior design studio plans offices, shops and restaurants, then coordinates vendors and site teams to deliver them. This is how to run designers, site coordinators and procurement staff under client pressure.
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Share your requirementsA commercial interior design company designs and often also builds workplaces, showrooms, restaurants and clinics. The studio has designers, visualisers and drafters; the delivery side has project managers, site coordinators, procurement staff and a list of vendors for joinery, lighting, flooring and furniture. A single job needs many suppliers to arrive in the right order, and the client may approve materials late. Designers are creative, while site staff are practical, and the two often disagree. Opening dates for shops and offices are fixed, which squeezes the last weeks. Many studios hire on project need and let people go afterwards, so skills do not build up. For the wider sector, read HR for the construction industry.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in commercial interior designers. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A beautiful detail cannot be built within budget, and each side blames the other.
Material sign-offs slip, and the team makes up time on site at night.
The coordinator knows who delivers late, and a leave day causes chaos.
Renders for pitches arrive on short notice, and the same people work every weekend.
Teams are built for a job and released, so learning is lost between projects.
Quotes miss site conditions, and margins disappear.
Opening day arrives with defects, and the client's memory is of the last week.
They draw details they have never seen built.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; Recruitment and Talent Acquisition; Performance Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for construction and real estate, not in general.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a commercial interior designers business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A buildability review before issue of drawings, with a site coordinator present, tracked in the performance process.
A buildability review before issue of drawings, with a site coordinator present, tracked in the performance process.
An approval log with dates and sample references, kept with project documentation.
An approval log with dates and sample references, kept with project documentation.
A vendor list with delivery record, contact and backup, maintained by procurement.
A vendor list with delivery record, contact and backup, maintained by procurement.
A pitch calendar and a limit on rush renders, with rest after heavy weeks.
A pitch calendar and a limit on rush renders, with rest after heavy weeks. See attendance and shift rules.
A small core of designers and coordinators on stable contracts, with project staff added through recruitment support.
A small core of designers and coordinators on stable contracts, with project staff added through recruitment support.
A schedule of site visits for each junior, with a note of what they learned.
A schedule of site visits for each junior, with a note of what they learned.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Buildability reviews and clear goals for design and delivery staff.
A core plus project staffing model that keeps skills.
Weekend and rush work rules for visualisers and site staff.
Approval, vendor and training records that survive staff changes.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in construction and real estate, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Site engineers, supervisors, crews and sales teams leave for different reasons. How to ask what shaped their decision and act on it between projects.
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A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
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How a D2C founder can test a performance marketing hire on real work, ignore weak signals such as dashboard screenshots, and run a fair process.
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A practical design for an IT services appraisal cycle: when to run it, how to rate fairly across projects, and how to explain hikes so they hold.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Add a buildability review before drawings go out, with a site person in the room.
Plan a pitch calendar, limit last-minute requests and give rest after peaks.
A small stable core plus project hires works better, because skills stay in the business.
Log them, tell the client the cost of delay and agree dates at the start.
Take them to site, pair them with seniors and review their details after installation.
We would look at the review process between design and site, the core team model and the weekend work pattern. Scope, timing and fees are written down so you know what you are buying.
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